ALMALAUREA CONFERENCE 2008

The 10th Survey on Graduate Employment was conducted at a special time in the history of the Italian university. Indeed, in 2007, of the 190,000 AlmaLaurea graduates from 46 universities, more than 75% had completed one of the degree courses that were started following the university reform back in 2001. Of these graduates, over 100,000 completed a first level degree course, but many of them – approximately 38,000 - are post-reform second level degree-holders (of which 8,000 single-cycle specialist degrees). Identifying the profile of first and second level degree-holders will make it possible to accurately assess the progress made by the university reform.

The Survey was made possible by the fact that an increasing number of universities have joined AlmaLaurea, thus contributing with ample, reliable and timely documentation which proved to be particularly useful to the Italian Ministry for University and Research (MiUR), the University Governing Bodies, the Assessment Boards, but also the high school principals and all the staff that provides guidance to high-school leavers.

Investigated issues

The availability of over 100 different variables made it possible to obtain an updated profile of the ALMALAUREA graduates who completed their studies between January 1st and December 31st 2007. The 2008 edition of the Graduate Profile Report follows the same breakdown of the previous years: university, subject area, faculty, degree course grouping, gender and type of graduate (studying workers, working students, studying students). A distinction is also preserved between “pure” graduates (i.e. those who enrolled directly in a post-reform degree course) and “hybrid” graduates (i.e. former pre-reform students who switched to the new post-reform system) even if the latter are increasingly lower in number.
The Survey analyzes the graduates’ characteristics by focusing mainly on the following:
- age at graduation and enrolment
- individual examination grades and degree grade
- prescribed course duration and degree completion times
- parents’ educational qualification
- social class
- type of secondary school-leaving certificate and grade
- reasons for the choice of the degree course
- class attendance level
- study abroad experiences
- in-house company training periods and internships
- time required to write the final dissertation
- overall assessment of the university experience
- sustainability of the course workload
- knowledge of foreign languages
- IT literacy
- intention to continue studying
- preferred working sector
- characteristics of the sought job.

The results of a specific survey on the quality of the training interships envisaged by the degree courses will also be presented. This survey was conducted on-line on the 2006 post-reform graduates who carried out the training periods included in the post-reform degree curricula.